I'm looking for a quiet ATI video card with good linux open source drivers. Based on my research the best drivers are the Gallium3D drivers which support r300-r500 ATI cards (and also r600-r700 cards). I don't care much about performance --- at most I would want to decode a 1080p video.
What is the quietest ATI card amongst the above models?
Quietest ATI (r300-r700) video cards
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
Re: Quietest ATI (r300-r700) video cards
The open source "radeon" driver will run anything from R100 on up, except the latest cards. The ATI binary drivers will run cards from R600 on up, I think. The R600 and newer cards have various levels of hardware H.264/VC-1 video processing but I'm unsure of how well Linux supports it. Older cards tend to only practically support WMV and MPEG2 in hardware but for pure software playback you can probably play 1080p all the way back to R200.
The high end cards with single slot coolers are the best choices. The double slot coolers have very noisy blowers. Mid range and low end cards with fans tend to have loud little fans. You can also find fanless cards out there. I've seen fanless high end models on ebay, probably OEM requests.
Otherwise you can put an Accelero S1 or S2 on just about any of these cards and cool them passively. I have an X850 XT with a Accelero S2 installed on it.
The high end cards with single slot coolers are the best choices. The double slot coolers have very noisy blowers. Mid range and low end cards with fans tend to have loud little fans. You can also find fanless cards out there. I've seen fanless high end models on ebay, probably OEM requests.
Otherwise you can put an Accelero S1 or S2 on just about any of these cards and cool them passively. I have an X850 XT with a Accelero S2 installed on it.
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Parappaman
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Re: Quietest ATI (r300-r700) video cards
The quietest cards are passively cooled. Just pick a card that has no fan among the ones supported by your driver and you'll be fine. 
If they're supported, and since you don't demand ANY gaming power, I'd get a HD2400 Pro or HD3450, just to use one of the latest architectures with better video decoding support.
If they're supported, and since you don't demand ANY gaming power, I'd get a HD2400 Pro or HD3450, just to use one of the latest architectures with better video decoding support.